Bookslut

October 2007

"My mother died a few years back, and not long after the funeral I started getting spam from her account. The first one offered free movie tickets like in the book. I was about twice as old in real life as my narrator so I didnít make much of it, but they kept coming, and after about a year I decided to make a story about it. I think my mom would have gotten a kick out of it."
by
Ned Vizzini

"Itís important to me personally, but I wish the rest of the world wouldnít believe in Him. Because I trust myself. Iím not going tell my kid nasty shit. Iím not going to blow myself up. Iím not going to start claiming land is mine because God says so. Iím not going to get there. Iíll believe it because it makes me feel a little better about myself; everybody else just go with Dawkins. Heís right. Itís much safer down that road."
by
Drew Nellins

"I wrote her a long incoherent letter, explaining my adoration inadequately, exclamatorily. She wrote back a nice short note saying, "If you're ever in New York, we could meet." I had only been to New York a couple of times and never unaccompanied. I had very little money at the time but I bought a plane ticket and a city map and went. To my astonishment she took me out for a very expensive dinner and we talked for hours. Much later I asked her why she had been so kind to me. She told me that many years before she had loved a certain writer's work. She wrote to this writer and was also given an invitation. She also dropped everything and went to an unfamiliar place alone. The writer didn't show up for their meeting. Diane waited for hours. I am very lucky to have benefited from that writer's discourtesy. "
by
Tao Lin

"I don't know that I'll ever be able to write a sprawling Dickensian novel. I'm just not wired that way. Look at George Saunders. Lee K. Abbot. Alice Munro. When it comes to short stories, they carry the biggest guns in the business. But all of them have expressed their reluctance -- even their fear -- to take on the novel. A sprinter can't always run a competitive marathon. A marathon runner can't always run a competitive sprint. One is not training ground for the other. You've got a certain configuration of red fibers and white fibers that determines which race will earn you the gold medal."
by
Weston Cutter

"[Teaching's] like being a good present-giver. You pay attention to their favorite things and extrapolate from thereÖ Also, there's the not-so-secret secret of teaching, which is that you get to keep on learning. If you want to think about the relationship between the graphic novel and poetry, you teach a seminar on that subject."
by
Weston Cutter

"I wasnít sure how I was supposed to piece it all together -- a woman writer in such a male-dominated genre, who wanted to write complex strong female protagonists -- Anne Rice and Poppy Brite favored male protagonists -- and also as someone who honestly didnít understand why genre and literary have to be so separate from each other. Not that I could have articulated this back then. I just had this idea that I wanted to write 'cross-genre fiction,' which I picked up from a Dean Koontz interview I read at way too impressionable an age."
by
Geoffrey H. Goodwin

Getting to Maybe tackles this very same process on a bigger scale: how to connect with the ongoing processes underlying a complex social problem in order to shift from seeing them to feeling them and finally to changing them. How do you catalyze a million different voices, or even just ten or twenty or a hundred, to bring about serious social change? How do you make a tipping point happen, so as to make real inroads against poverty, street crime, the AIDS epidemic?
by
Barbara J. King

The physicist C. P. Snow announced in 1959 in his book The Two Cultures that between science and art lies "a gulf of mutual incomprehension -- sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding." Granted, the two endeavors seem schism-separated, but a few scientists and artists have made the journey and lived to tell the tale.
by
TK Kenyon